"...And, behold, seven other cows come up after them out of the River, ugly
and lean of flesh; and they stood by the other [fat] cows upon the brink of
the River." [Genesis 41:3]
An important but much-overlooked detail of Pharaoh's famous dream is the
fact that the seven lean cows stood side by side with the seven fat cows on
the bank of the river. In other words, all fourteen cows existed
simultaneously in Pharaoh's dream--unlike in reality, in which the seven
years of famine came after the seven years of plenty were over.
This is why Pharaoh's wise men, who thought up all kinds of exotic
interpretations to his dream (e.g., "seven daughters will be born to you,
and seven daughters will die"), did not accept the solution staring them in
the face. When are cows fat? When there's been a plentiful harvest! And when
are they lean? When there's famine. Ditto with the fat and lean ears of
corn. What could be more obvious?
But Pharaoh saw the fat and lean cows grazing together. You don't have years
of plenty and years of famine at the same time, said the wise men. The
dreams must mean something else--something less obvious, more metaphorical.
Joseph's genius was that he understood that Pharaoh's dreams not only
foretold events to come, but also instructed how to deal with them: they
were telling Pharaoh to make the seven years of plenty coexist with the
seven years of famine. When Joseph proceeded to tell Pharaoh how to prepare
for the coming famine, he wasn't offering unasked-for advice; that advice
was part of the dreams' interpretation. If you store the surplus grain from
the plentiful years, Joseph was saying, then the seven fat cows will still
be around when the seven lean cows emerge from the river--and the lean cows
will have what to eat.
The Chassidic masters note that the first galut ("exile") of the Jewish
people came about in a haze of dreams. Joseph's dreams, the baker and the
butler's dreams and Pharaoh's dreams brought Joseph, and then his entire
family, to Egypt, where they were to suffer exile, enslavement and
persecution until their liberation by Moses more than two centuries later.
Jacob's own earlier exile to Charan likewise began and ended with dreams.
For galut is a dream: a state of existence rife with muddled metaphors,
horrific exaggerations and logical impossibilities. A state in which fat
and lean cows exist simultaneously--in which a cow can even be
simultaneously fat and lean.
Galut is a place where a thriving economy is both a blessing and a curse,
where the rising tide of freedom unleashes the best and the worst in man,
where a globe-griding Web conveys wisdom and filth, where we're saturated in
spirituality and spiritually impoverished at the same time.
But there's a way to deal with this cosmic mess. Listen to Joseph speak
(even Pharaoh recognizes good advice when he sees it). Don't run away from
the dream, says Joseph, don't look for some other meaning. Use it. If galut
presents you with the paradox of the fat cow and the lean cow grazing
together on the brink of the river, use the fat cow to nourish the lean cow.
Make the dream the solution.